Virginia Tech to Fort Hood

On November 5, 2009, a Muslim US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on fellow soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and injuring 30. On April 16, 2007, a Korean-American student named Cho Seung-Hui opened fire on his fellow students at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, a school from which Hasan graduated in 1997. Thirty-two students died. Hui committed suicide.

And both incidents probably could have been avoided had political correctness been held at bay, and if common sense had prevailed.

Most soldiers at FortHood are not armed until they are mustered out to a war zone. And Virginia Tech – a state-run school – is a “gun free” zone. This precluded an armed student from taking out Hui, while a civilian police officer responding to the FortHood crisis had to shoot Hasan because there were no arms in the crowd that Hasan shot into.

A crowd of soldiers…

So much for the concept that “gun free” places are… free of guns.

At Virginia Tech, it took two hours for campus security officers to alert students that the first two murders of the day had taken place. Yet the very next day, before the proverbial smoke had even cleared, a convocation was held to remember the dead students. No time was wasted there for the politically-correct therapy culture to seize the campus.

At the memorial, Virginia Tech ‘school poet’ Nikki Giovanni started railing about disease in Africa and something about loose boulders crushing houses in Appalachia, apparently a gratuitous swipe at the mining industry.This was more political jawboning at a time of great emotion and tragedy. Because liberals never, ever stop their political profiteering.

Liberals like president Obama have warned us not to jump to conclusions about Hasan. Yet Obama jumped immediately to conclusions in the case of black Harvard professor Henry Gates last summer. Obama said the police “acted stupidly” when he did not even have all the facts in the case where Gates was arrested after suspicious activity was reported at a Cambridge residence.

After Virginia Tech, the media immediately went full bore into a gun-control debate. Yet within twelve hours of the FortHood attacks, far-left Newsweek magazine was editorializing that Hasan’s actions were the fault of America because Hasan was afraid and angry about his coming deployment to Afghanistan. Newsweek said, ‘And the U.S. military could well be reaching a breaking point as the president decides to send more troops into Afghanistan‘… ‘From there, it isn’t much of a leap to argue that to further tax our military would do as much as anything to guarantee that the homegrown terror on display today could well repeat itself in the future.’

Yet nobody forced Hasan into the military, and nobody forced him to accept military financing of his education as a psychiatrist, the role in which he served. And nobody forced him to pull the trigger. Unless there was a wider conspiracy, which we do not yet know about and which the media will refuse to even conjecture about.

This certainly looks like a terrorist act. After all this type of small-scale individual attack has been considered a possibility since 9/11.

In the Virginia Tech shootings, the facts are startling. Killer Hui was a known loner and weirdo who had written violent short stories that frightened his teacher. He had a history of mental illness. But on many of today’s college campuses we can expect psychosis and violence to be considered normal, rather than suspect. After all most colleges preach abortion (anger at children); disdain for God and Christian peace; and extremist environmentalism (anger at humans and their activities) while nurturing a self-indulgent ethic that is “non-judgmental”.

Hui’s former English professor Lucinda Roy ultimately did nothing about his violent writings, while in 2005, a Virginia court even declared Hui an imminent threat to others. But special justice Paul Barrett decided that Hui was not crazy enough to be committed to a mental-health facility, which would have red-flagged the purchase of the gun that he used to kill his fellow students.

Barrett’s decision is part of the Therapy Culture pushed by liberals in America, in which derangement is normalized, and nobody wants to “offend” anyone by describing truthfully their condition. The same liberals shut down hundreds of state mental institutions in the late 1970s, putting hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people on the streets…. uh, homeless people, that is.

Hui even left notes and videotapes behind condemning rich kids and even Christianity itself. So Hui had learned his lessons well, had he not? Is this not the anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity and class-warfare tactic advocated by many leftists in academia and in the media today, and even seen in terrorists’ jihad videos?

Yet the immediate media spin after the FortHood massacre was that we shouldn’t jump to any conclusion, that Hasan’s Muslim roots had nothing to do with the killing.

We shall see as the investigation proceeds. Hasan is recovering from his injuries.

The military became aware more than 6 months ago of internet postings by a Nidal Hasan that defended Islamic extremism. And federal official knew that he was communicating through the internet with radical Islamist websites. Yet where was the follow-up? Was the military too politically-correct to look into this character? Meanwhile many of the media were careful to immediately report that Hasan allegedly reported having been harassed about being Muslim after 9/11. But the military claims Hasan filed no grievance.

Hasan is known even to have argued with and harangued his own psychiatric patients at Walter Reed army hospital in Washington, DC – where he counseled soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – about the morality of the war. Why couldn’t the military have seen how wrong this was? Or is the military itself today so politically correct that they cannot take a stand simply because someone is Muslim?

Now imagine if a Christian had argued against, say, homosexuality in a public hospital.

He would be fired immediately…

A Department of Homeland Security report last Spring said that police should be on the lookout for threatening right-wing radicals on American highways with anti-abortion and 3rd party presidential bumper stickers(!) and continued:

‘… rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat… The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today… After Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991, some returning military veterans—including Timothy McVeigh—joined or associated with rightwing extremist groups….A prominent civil rights organization reported in 2006 that “large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”‘

So how about Islamists in our military posting on the internet and arguing against American policy? Do they deserve scrutiny? And where was our Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano on this one?

Newsweek made another case for Hasan’s actions:

‘And while those who have faced multiple deployments are the most likely candidates to lash out irrationally after returning, it’s impossible to discount how the grind of an eight-year war has affected the rest of the military, who see friends leave whole and return in pieces; who wonder constantly if they’ll be next. (As a psychiatrist, Hasan may have been particularly vulnerable: there have been numerous accounts of chaplains suffering from depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after counseling returning soldiers. Hearing their horror stories, sharing their pain, and being unable to help often pushed these men over the edge. The fact that they were supposed to be healers, that they had never seen combat themselves, made it much harder to ask for help.)’

So here is another rationale from the left. Poor Hasan was traumatized by the traumatized. Which would seem to indicate that he was not fit for service and should have been cashiered out of the military long ago.

From the bogus DukeUniversity rape charges filed by a black stripper against a group of white lacrosse players, to a former Taliban member attending YaleUniversity, American media/university liberalism is out of control. 88 Duke professors even signed an accusatory newspaper ad targeting the lacrosse players before the facts were in, and then refused to apologize when they were proven wrong. This is the type of arrogance that permeates the media and academia today.

The military should have scrutinized Hasan. But in today’s hyper-politically-correct world, such direct action is seen as rash and inappropriate. And the result was an extremist reaction – the murder of 13 innocent soldiers and civilians that clearly was the work of an Islamic radical working right under the noses of the same American military that is sworn to protect all of us. And only those who look beyond the hype will see that it is reason and rationality that will prevent such incidents in the future.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.